Dunois, and
other brave leaders, continued to attack the English. After seventeen
years' vengeance for his father's death, the Duke of Burgundy made his
peace with Charles by a treaty at Arras, on condition of paying no more
homage, in 1434. Bedford died soon after, and there were nothing but
disputes among the English. Paris opened its gates to the king, and
Charles, almost in spite of himself, was restored. An able merchant,
named Jacques Coeur, lent him money which equipped his men for the
recovery of Normandy, and he himself, waking into activity, took Rouen
and the other cities on the coast.

13. Conquest of Aquitaine (1450).--By these successes Charles had
recovered all, save Calais, that Henry V. or Edward III. had taken from
France. But he was now able to do more. The one province of the south
which the French kings had never been able to win was Guienne, the duchy
on the river Garonne. Guienne had been a part of Eleanor's inheritance,
and passed through her to the English kings; but though they had lost
all else, the hatred of its inhabitants to the French enabled them to
retain this, and Guienne had never yet passed under French rule. It was
wrested, however, from Eleanor's descendants in this flood-tide of
conquest. Bordeaux held out as long as it could, but Henry VI. could
send no aid, and it was forced to yield. Two years later, brave old Lord
Talbot led 5000 men to recover the duchy, and was gladly welcomed; but
he was slain in the battle of Castillon, fighting like a lion. His two
sons fell beside him, and his army was broken. Bordeaux again
surrendered, and the French kings at last found themselves master of the
great fief of the south. Calais was, at the close of the great Hundred
Years' War, the only possession left to England south of the Channel.

14. The Standing Army (1452).--As at the end of the first act in the
Hundred Years' War, the great difficulty in time of peace was the
presence of the bands of free companions, or mercenary soldiers, who,
when war and plunder failed them, lived by violence and robbery of the
peasants. Charles VII., who had awakened into vigour, thereupon took
into regular pay all who would submit to discipline, and the rest were
led off on two futile expeditions into Switzerland and Germany, and
there left to their fate. The princes and nobles were at first so much
disgusted at the regulations which bound the soldiery to respect the
magistracy, that they raised a rebe